Issue VI, Volume X : July 2019

Eleanor Stanford - Poetry

Eleanor Stanford's The Book of Sleep was published by Carnegie Mellon UP in 2008. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Harvard Review, The Georgia Review, and many other journals. She lives in Salvador, Brazil, with her husband and three young sons,
where she works as a guidance counselor at an international school and maintains a blog, The Golden Papaya.

The day is half light, half dark.Thus the Spanish and the Portugueseonce split the world in two.

By the pool, the flowers droop.The ones they call graça,with their glowing throatsand feathered tongues.

Letter to Laura from Arembepe

In the thatch-roofed Hippy Village, the man is hacking opena coconut. He drops a straw into the jagged hole. The smoothwhite flesh, cup like an inverted moon.

Once Janis Joplin stayed here, slept in a hammock strungbetween two palms; threw herself into the roughsurf, or lay floating on her back and stared at clear blue sky.

There it's getting cold again. Again, the heartbeat on the screengrew faint and flickered out. When you told me your voice broke.I didn't know if it was the weight of loss, or just the milesof ocean the cable's buried under.

Here the shore's bicornate: splitalong rocks' ventricle. The shallows where the children play,the churning on the other side.

I hold my sons' small hands, and we wade in.Even in the glassy calm, I feel the undertow,ocean's umbilical tug.

My boys slipbeyond my grasp, their bodies slick as seals.

And Janis rises up beyond the sharp outcropping,her hair wild, the woody shell of her voicecracking, the sweet water spilling out.